Notes

Kicking your mac around shouldn't have any noticeable effect on the hard drives - if you drop it from 1m every once in a while then yes, otherwise not really - remember iPods had hard drives for quite a while. Your computer sees hard drives and ssds the same way, you can have as many of either as you can fit

You could try getting a neodymium magnet and run it across the earpiece grill. In my father's case, a lot of metal powder was in there, pressing in the speaker membrane; the alternative is cleaning it (which does require opening the phone using Eric's very nice guide). The alternative to those is ordering an earpiece online - but usually those are really bad quality, so trying to fix the original one would be advisable